search engines

Not Useful WordPress plugins

The plugin’s below are the ones that I don’t use at this blog. I focus on plugins that don’t require modification of the theme and that are easy to use. I am using Websynthesis hosting as my hosting provider and they have great support.

123Linkit Affiliate Marketing Tool – Generate money easily from your blog by transforming brand names and product keywords into affiliate links. There’s no need to apply to affiliate networks or programs – we do it all for you. Just install the plugin, sync your posts and we’ll automatically add relevant, money-making affiliate links to your blog. This has been the most effective in terms of money generating plugin I have used. I stopped using this. It didn’t generate enough money to be worth the effort.

Add to Header (Great banner software!) – Add stuff to your theme header, such as CSS, JavaScript, metadata, Google Analytics etc. (This is good but I don’t use this anymore)

Antispam Bee (Better than Akismet) – Easy and extremely productive spam-fighting plugin with many sophisticated solutions. Includes protection again trackback spam. This works great but spam became so overwhelming I had to turn off comments. Spammers are so refined I was spending way too much time on it.

Archives – This was more like a tag cloud with a few other features. Not what I am looking for.

Auto Tags – This tags posts on save and update from tagthe.net and yahoo services. This caused errors in WordPress error_log.

Backup by Blogvault – It is difficult to get a reliable backup utility. I have tried many of them. I thought my last backup tool would do the job but it wasn’t reliable either. I have only a 100 MB database. It must be tough for bigger sites. Of course WordPress official VaultPress is great, but at almost twice the price out of the range of most average bloggers. This was my favorite backup tool but Websynthesis said it was too resource intensive and they do backups automatically.

Backup Buddy – (This is their copy not mine) The most complete WordPress solution for Backup, Restoration, and Migration. Backs up a customizable choice of files, settings, and content for the complete snapshot of your site. Restore and/or migrate your site to a new host or new domain with complete ease-of-mind.

Comment Email Verification – If a comment is held for moderation an e-mail message is sent to the comment’s author with a link to verify the comment author’s e-mail address. When the comment author clicks on that link the comment gets approved immediately. This makes discussions more lively as users don’t have to wait for the blog admin to approve the comment. Spam was overwhelming even with this on.

Easy Favicon – Choose a favicon to make your site eye-catching and easily recognizable by visitors. I have my favicon file put in the right place but not all browsers will recognize it. This enables every browser I’ve tried to see it. Jetpack updated and had a favicon support function. Works great but a better Favicon plugin exists called Favicon by Favicon RealGenerator.

Google XML sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users. (This never made any difference that I could tell)

Grid Archives – This looks interesting for archive pages. Stopped working with an error message.

Grunion Contact Form – Add a contact form to any post, page or text widget. Emails will be sent to the post’s author by default, or any email address you choose. As seen on WordPress.com. Don’t use this anymore.

IntenseDebate – IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Full comment and account data sync between IntenseDebate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you! I don’t use this anymore.

Jetpack by WordPress.com – Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users.

Leverage Browser Caching Ninja – To speedup your WordPress site dramatically. This works but a script works better and doesn’t slow down your site. You can find the script on the Useful Plugins link at the top of this post.

Login Lockdown – After hackers were trying to get into my site I had to install this. It has worked great. Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range.

Media Library Gallery – This will show all the photos in your media library. Fantastic and easy. It does seem to work well unless you care about your site performance. It dragged my site performance down according to P3 performance plugin. Avoid. Use Jetpack Tiled galleries instead.

myEASYwebally – More than a simple plugin, myEASYwebally lets you save quite a good amount of time when doing your WordPress blog maintenance! You need a free API key to use it. I don’t use this anymore.

No Self Pings – I got tired of deleting comments when I linked to my own site. In addition it takes space and obscures the real reason for the pingbacks which is to show your link to other blogs/writers. This worked great but slowed down performance according to P3.

Popular Posts Tabbed Widget for Jetpack – This is a great widget that pulls from your jetpack data and displays info about your most popular posts, comments, pages. Nice interface as well. This caused errors in WordPress error log.

post-views – Record how many times the post have been views and show it. I don’t use this anymore.

PushPress – I haven’t noticed any difference from using this. PubSubHubbub plugin for WordPress that includes the hub I stopped using this.

Remove Query Strings From Static Resources – This works and speeds up your site, but it is silly to have when you can simply make a simple change to your functions.php file and not have the overhead of this plugin. The more plugins the slower your site is, and the slower it is the more google penalizes you in search results.

Select AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons – Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, StumbleUpon, Digg and many more.I stopped using this.

SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well. I don’t use this anymore.

Share Buttons by AddtoAny – This plugin slows down your site dramatically and shares information. Don’t use it.

Search Meter – Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter section in the Dashboard to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog.

Smart Archives Reloaded – This is a really classy looking archive plugin. Hasn’t been updated in awhile, but still works/looks better than more recently updated ones.

Stop Spammer Registration Plugin – This was good for awhile, but then it caused tons of errors that caused my site to go offline when I was on vacation. A month later the errors caused my site to slow down again. Delete.

Where did they go from here? – Show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page. Much like Amazon.com’s product pages. Based on the plugin by Mark Ghosh. Thinking of deleting this. It often fails to show images in the post.

WordPress Popular Posts – Showcases your most popular posts to your visitors on your blog’s sidebar. Use WordPress Popular Posts as a widget or place it anywhere on your theme using php wpp_get_mostpopular(); ?> I don’t use this anymore.

WP Simple Galleries – This is a awesome plugin that instantly and easily lets you add photos to it from your media library or upload if they aren’t in your library. It only requires a short code and it has a beautiful display on the webpage. Free! It works great but I just don’t need it.

WPDBSpringClean – Delete what WP-Cleanup cannot such as unused tables or whitespace. This makes your database smaller and useful if you have deleted posts/photos.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.I don’t use this anymore.Contextual suggestions of links, pictures, related content and SEO tags that makes your blogging fun and efficient. I don’t use this anymore.

Notes: I stopped using these plugins because they weren’t worth it anymore. They created more work than they solved. They either caused the site to crash, added unnecessary information, were duplicated as Jetpack has gained features, were end of life by the developers, (Developers, developers, developers) or just were passed up by better plugins I found.

It is interesting how some of the most popular pieces of content on this website are photos. Today the visits from Yahoo image search are way more than I would normally receive. The traffic to this sun rising photo are huge.

It is interesting that referrals from Pinterest are usually the reason photos are popular. At times however, the image search for Google/Yahoo are very popular as well. Search engines are capricious. Why is today my photo of the sun popular and not yesterday?